One aspect those who champion the cheaper more numerous fighters, the greater the numbers the greater the maintenance organization that must exist -ie the F-14, etc. This a great part of the total cost is the manpower element.

Adrian

hmm it would seem that cheaper more numerous fighters would be more advantageous for those in a defensive scenario.. or at least in today’s situation?

I emphasize today’s situation because smaller light fighters won’t match the range of the small P-51 or F-86

Both links seem to be dead.

A lightweight fighter has very little appeal for a global power such as the United States, or any of the key NATO allies. While there may be a market for a fighter smaller, cheaper and lighter than the F-35, it is solely an export market.

It seems that future conflicts will be fought in regions such as the Middle East and South Asia, where severe demands will be placed on the range and endurance of any combat aircraft.

Entire CDI site seems to be down at the moment, try again later.

Anyways, I gotta thank everyone for this lively discussion. It beats the Sino-Indo-Pakistani-Yugoslavia-Iran threads that have been so dominant these days :dev2:

Seems like only Entropy here has some leanings with the “Mafia”? When browsing on Air Combat Information Group..it seems that some others there like Tom Cooper and Kurt Plummer are also supportive of the Mafia.. although their reasons are different.

a quote from there:
——————————
If I’m to ask, light fighters are actually today more badly needed than ever before.

From what I can hear from different air forces about the newest modern fighters, these are partially so complex to fly and operate by the pilots, that physical condition of the pilot is meanwhile on the verge of being moved to the place No.2 on the scale of what is needed to be pilot. It might be replaced by the ability of the pilot to use and serve all the electronic systems faster than anybody else.

With other words: especially the older pilots have immense problems with the systems on F-22 and EF-2000: youngsters – especially those with considerable experience on PC-games – are doing the job in the cockpit in a far more efficient manner.

This is in line with the theoreticians from the 1980s, that the modern fighters are becoming too complex for the pilots flying them to really be able to do everything the plane can in the best possible manner. The “Light-Fighter Maffia” (LFM) says that planes and pilots should be specialized, because this guarnatees the best performance in combat. Instead, the producers – but also the most important air forces world-wide – tend to produce and buy aircraft that “can do it all”.

This makes the aircraft more complex and more expensive to purchas and to operate, and it makes the training of the pilots also almost impossible. The pilots have to train air combat, air-to-ground missions, deployment of EO-PGMs, LG-PGMs, ARMs, CSAR, CAS, etc. and eventually become “jocks of all trades, masters of none”. On the contrary, so the LFM, pilots specializing for these different tasks excell in what they do, then they train it most of the times.

IMHO, I’m also for that way of doing the job, and one of the arguments I see repeatedly confirmed is also the inability of even the most advanced aerospace companies to accumulate all the requested capabilities into a single system, put into the same airplane. Already the F-14 and F-15 were overloaded with all the avionics, radars, RWRs, ECM-systems – much of which never actually functioned as expected (the ECM-system of USN F-14As never covered the whole aircraft, just for example) etc.

The Greeks wanted their F-4E PI2000s to be compatible with AIM-120 and a plethora of very different weapons from completely different manufacturers. There were problems, and after two years of work there still might be some. The Bulgarians wanted the MiG to do the same with their MiG-29s: the MiG is already two years later, and Bulgarians think about cancelling the contract. The F-22 is so complex and its avionics already now so sensitive, that the aircraft is having immense problems with sub-assemblies that jam each other when they work. From what I’ve hard, the whole system has to be re-booted at least two times per hour of flight in this moment, with the pilot every time hoping & praying the system would work after being rebooted and he at least having the navigation so to find the way back home and return safely. Rafale, EF-2000 and F/A-18E/F are going to need years of work and additional – expensive – “upgrade stages” to be brought to their full standard (much of which is sometimes advertised as it would be available already now).

All of this could be avoided by procurring specialized airframes: a one-way system, with only two or three tasks – regardless if interception, or air-to-ground or whatever – with pilots specially trained for these. That way one has the best solution for every of these tasks too, and certainly no problems with avionics, or crews not ready for combat on short notice.

-TC

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Lot of interesting views…

1. Sparrows, The Midget’s Ball And Chain.
The YF-16 tested AIM-7 at both the midwing on a specialized pylon and underneath the fuselage on landing gear door mounts. Given that the original radar was to be in the APQ-153/159 class, this was more for ‘what if’ reasoning to explore alternatives to F-15 purchase numbers than anything and (as you would expect with all those big fins and 500lbs of dead weight) the machine performed like a rowboat pulling the supertanker. The later F-16ADF and some (Egyptian) F-16C mod aircraft were not much better with similiar problems including (according to one report) a 4G assymetric carriage limit.
2. Floating In Fuel.
What Boyd did with the F-16 that tricked everybody was to increase the _fuel quotient_ ratio of takeoff weight to fuel load. This is what gave the F-16 a really decent set of legs (and is similar to the ‘fuel everywhere’ success inherent to the P-51). However; what equally killed the F-16 as a multirole platform was the lack of _remaining_ internal volume to add missions-thru-systems. In particular, things like a small radar and no internal ECM more or less crippled the jet in terms of being able to support an ‘advantaged merge’ through BVR intercept vectoring. While the need to carry wing tanks (with the Ami Express Card on the centerline) both limited the total bomb load and added to the total ‘mission penalty’ of combined tunnel and interference drag between the big jugs and the TER’d/LAU’d multirack ordnance.
In this, it should be remembered that the F-15A though only having a quotient of something like .24-.25 (10K over 42K) compared to the .33 (6900 over 21K) of the F-16A ‘in the airsuperiority role’ _had as a percentage of it’s max gross takeoff weight_ a much more competitive fraction. Where the F-16 is at .22 (6900 over 32K) and the F-15E (or ‘Israeli mod’ A/C) is at comparitive values of .35 (28K over 81K) and .41 (28K over 68K), respectively. I doubt even an F-16E with CFT could fly from the base of the Sinai to Northern Greece with X12 Mk.82 class munitions and return, unrefueled. Yet this was the baseline advertisement for the F-15E. Even as F-15A’s, despite having nominally ‘shorter range’ than the F-16A, not only accompanied them for 500nm at very low altitudes with a HUGE presented frontal area (twin 610’s centerline ECM and CFT) penalty but also sprinted ahead and up to perch to look into the Iraqi Airfields H2/3 and BIA as a BARCAP shield during the Osiraq raid.
Before turning around, shepherding up their charges and flying ‘high cover’, into a 60 knot headwind, all the way back to Israel. Where they split off the Vipers and headed back to Tel Nof in Northern Israel ‘with gas to spare’.
As the F-16’s came in with an average of 800lbs remaining /despite/ having dropped their wing tanks AND flown with centerline 310’s with an additional 2,000lbs of fuel.
How? POWER. And enough mass not to feel as badly the effects of inertia and drag.
3. Picking Yourself Up By Somebody Else’ Bootstraps.
What the above illustrates, is that the F-16A doesn’t ‘carry it’s own weight’ so much as /rely on others/ to achieve those parts of the mission set which it cannot (F-15A’s could have flown the same profile with a single Mk.84 on the centerline or two under the wings and still had much more effective ‘self defense’ options, not least being to run away). To compensate but never equal the larger jet’s load lifting and systems stuffing capability we went into a period of even greater mistakes inherent to the F-16C with it’s bulkier APG-68 and heavy load carrying structural improvements and later (more drag) ‘external addons’ such as LANTIRN and HTS and the thirstier DFE/IPE engines that became necessary to push it all through the air.
Again, in comparing with the twin jet and small vs. large force variant separations of true mission utility, you find that light weight = low price = multirole. NOT as a function of ‘capability’. But of /availability/, by sorties generated. Nothing more.
And once you start making a ground attack aircraft out of a lightweight fighter, all it’s raceway optimized performance advantages go straight to hell as soon as a function of ‘street’ reality.
Not least of which is price.
The F-16A was an honest 10 million dollar fighter when it first started coming online in 1978. The F-16C was more like 20 million in it’s least useful, .25, model only 6 years later. The lowest it was /ever/ brought to again was something like a 11 million dollars to compete with the ’12 and free maintenance!’ F-20 for the ADF program, 2 years after that.
Since this nominal C version was stripped almost to A-level standards (and any overages would have been dumped straight back into the Block.40 which was then ongoing as the latest ‘useful’ production model.) and indeed _was not purchased_ when it was decided to go with the F-16ADF ‘ALC depot kit mod’ to inventory aircraft, you can guess what a jet with LANTIRN and later IPE/Smart-HARM capabilties would be more likely to go for. 32 million being the price range most often (USAF model purchase) quoted with upwards of 80 million for the F-16E which actually manages to internalize all the systems which we had to add, GFE-incrementally, as a function of _split mission_ purchases.
4. Inventories built upon Synergizing Missions Suck.
As a ‘total farce’, not force. Because when they aren’t available or their mission role is superceded, they compromise the rest of the force until a replacement or means of upgrade ($$$) is found. In the latter case, it should be remembered that if the majority of your fleet does bombing because that is what wins wars (if only by virtue of there being far more ground targets needing killing before that war can be said to be won). And bombing, especially lolo in a NATO environment where the radar SAM thicket is almost as dense as the trashfire envelope, means dedicating that element of your force which is _numerically_ able to withstand the largest quantity of attrition. Then you are STILL forced to acknowledge the ‘lowest common denominator’ of mean-capability as being ‘the best’ that you can repeatedly generate to take those losses.
F-15B 71-021 (the DRF/AFCD testbed for the later F-15E) was generating combined SAR/FLIR attack capabilities with LGB in 1984. The F-16C.50+ with APG-68V(9) only equalled this, last year. And an F-16 that obeys the moronic belief of ‘better a smart HUD and a dumb bomb’ has never tried to laydown ordnance through European sleet or Iraqi rainy season thunderheads.
Yet that is what you are left DOING if you cannot find a munition as much as mission tasking system which isn’t reliant on smart radar or optics to cue with. Drumroll please, JDAM now fulfill’s this quite nicely so that you are right back at ‘how much you can carry, how far (how fast) instead of particulars of systems. And heavyweight platforms always. ALWAYS. Beat light weights in this category.
5. People Mistake Multirole, Swingrole and Multimission.
Multirole implies the ability to fly one (A2A, A2G, SEAD, Recce for a top 4) mission, come home, strip the particular kit associated therewith, apply another and go up again to perform a new mission. Which is fine until operational tempo kills your ground crews on the reconfigure+turn. Or natural attrition removes the airframes with the capabiltiy to change their hat. Or the enemy occupies/blows up the airbase because you tried to fly too many different missions rather than enough /total/
sorties.
Swingrole means the ability to switch performance categories as much as specific missions, in-flight. You fight your way through to the target, then you bomb, then you ‘perform an aggressive fighter sweep’ on your way home. This means deluding oneself into believing in the ability of a fighter with a 30-40lbsqft heavier wingloading and doubled drag due to air to ground munitions carriage to be competitive with a jet that has none of these problems AND is coming from half the distance through it’s own ADGE. An F-16 quickly becomes a MiG-21 (performance wise) when so loaded and thus assuming that it can match a MiG-29 or Su-30 which are better than it is when clean is utterly ludicrous.
Multimission means you CAN accomplish whatever ‘sudden goal’ the randomization factors of the existing combat environment throw at you. But you are NOT ‘forced to’ by their basic presence. Nor is your platform utility rendered defunct by their absence. If this sounds confusing, let me make the mud a little more transparent: MILITARY TRAINING DOES NOT SUPPORT THE DIFFUSION OF INTENT. Rather it seeks to /concentrate/ (focus) all available assets and capabilities on the fewest possible supporting tasks to achieve a mission objective per raid.
Where the complexity and sophistication of tactical (warfighter) and strategic (purchasing) doctrine sets in is in the ability to segregate and delegate specialist capabilities towards /subset/ missions that help achieve that one principle objective. Through synergy. If the running back has to put the pigskin in the endzone, you may have half a dozen linemen shielding the QB until handoff. Two wide receivers acting as decoys to soak up enemy defensive backfield assets. And 3-4 ‘close escorts’ for lead blocks on the man with the winning touchdown in his hands. But it is still THAT ONE GUY that is principle reason for all other asset’s existence.
And it is a huge waste of resources because each specialist platform, whether it /can/ perform well in other roles or not, cannot accomplish those other missions if it has to support assets in ONE dedicated mission. The F-16C.40 was designed to fight lolo BAI in NATO using automated TFR and standoff/precision-cued weapons through the targeting pod to maintain some degree of safety from the S2A and A2A defenses of the WARPAC. When that mission vanished and the jet simply didn’t have enough pylons or power to take fuel -and- ARM -and- smart ordnance up above the trashfire. We had to add another layer to the cake in the form of the F-16C.50 with the ‘mini-D’ ASQ-213 pod and CLC smart-HARM launch capability to support the medium level attack.
The result then being that not only was the (limited inventory) LANTIRN F-16 force now reliant on the Blk.50 but -also- that there was no /money/ left for improving the former ‘Queen of the Fleet’ (numbers dense) C.30’s to be more than visual HUDWAC bombers.
So that, ten years on, you see a force structure in which the F-16C.50 is now the dominant numeric platform in the services but it can’t individually target a smart bomb without offboard help. And without a mission for it’s own SEAD specialty (there being so few SA-xx radar threat SAM’s in most combat theaters) we are having to ‘reconsider’ and deploy the Sniper and LITENING pods on a .50/.30 force which is largely 12-15 years old and thus on the verge, not merely of technical obsolescence (as every SAM/AAM becomes AIM-120 equivalent for autonomous homing and ‘silent off rail’ concerns) but of maintainability and fatigue life remaining as well.
Thus we lose the intelligent weasel capability to gain a precision (electrooptical) strike one. And still have no real commonality of strike/AAW/DEAD options within the tired F-16 fleet to serve as either a swing or a multimission force, on it’s own. Total USAF inventory being ‘divide by three’ along lines of power, parent (Guard/Rez) support and mission capability.
6. ‘Brochure’ is bogus.
The P-51 was nearly uncontrollable in blind-climbout when the aft tank was full. We lost tens of pilots this way. About the time you were crossing over the low countries and this tank emptied out, you found you were still heavy with external 75/108 drop tanks. Which, if you were bounced early, would still have to come off and _automatically_ kill your ‘full depth accompaniment’ escort options into the Reich. OTOH, even if the Luftwaffe waited until they could summon the full weight of the RVD units in marshalled mass over the Fatherland itself, if ONE of those tanks stayed on the airplane when you spotted the contrails, then you mission killed THREE airplanes. The man himself and a dedicated escort section to get him home alive. Did we EVER learn the folly of ‘drop your gas to lighten your power loading’ requirements later on? Nope. Not until the Raptor anyway.
The ‘laminar flow wing’ of the P-51 was not that great. /By design/, it was only partial-span effective and when you added paint and constant maintenance (dings in the skin and levered panels from constantly removed MG magazine covers among others) it quickly lost most of even that efficiency. What it _did achieve_ was only of benefit in cruise. In a turn, and particularly in accelerated windups where the twist and sectional profiles of the OUTER panels are more important to keeping the lift on the wing, the P-51 was actually not much of a ACM fighter. Especially since, even the smooth inboard flow broke down and it quickly got soft-boundaried and the whole airframe began to stutter and mush. If the Mustang had an advantage it was in baseline speed and the fact that it was, simply, ‘present where required’.
You want ‘light weight’? The Mustang sure as hell wasn’t even in the running. The P-51D scaled in at something like 10-12Klbs. The Spitfire and 109, at least in early models, were the kings of the lightweights at more like 6-8K. The P-47 was something like 15-17K. The Spitfire could thus run rings around the Mustang in both horizontal and climbing turn close combat as a pure angleship, ‘by engine class and altitude’ (Series 60 with the Packard) wardate equivalency. And once the former aircraft moved to the Griffon powerplant, it completely dominated the Pony. Though it now weighed almost as much and was no longer a ‘pilot’s airplane’ as an _energy-powerful_ rather than agile aircraft. Power:weight (whether through controlled structural mass or sheer HP) thus being the lesson to take from this, something the ‘above 28K and even the dualspeed blower can’t keep up’ restricted Mustang never really competed in either.
Yet the Spitfire was never built in numbers because it was a ‘hand crafted’ design and thus it was never THERE (over enemy territory, taking losses) because both the basic PDI design and the production rationale never supported filling it up with gas to make the trip (not until the postwar-XVIII anyway) to where it could sustain much higher losses.
The P-38L and P-47N were the longest ranging fighters of the war. The design trade choices which (ruined the handling) of the Mustang to make it a competitive platfrom as an escort were purely political as you _cannot_ beat volume-for-gas and cylinder-horse for throttle setting in the bigger machines. Nor indeed the sheer /mass/ to keep it headed, stablely, in the right direction. Particularly as more P-47’s were series built to take the mods (wing fuel on the M raised gross weight to over 20Klbs) than any other Allied fighter of the war, you cannot even argue the ‘production economics’ end of things.
If you want a straight up Pony comparitor across all levels of performance, look no further than the F4U-1 Corsair. Which was a close match to the P-51’s design envelope and was available almost 2 years sooner (especially once the hangups over Carrier operations became clear, sending the Grumman fighter 9,000 miles West instead of 3,500 East was one of the war’s greatest tragedies).
And yet, despite being a match to the Mustang, the Corsair was ALSO almost a ton heavier.
Sticking within available ETO machines, most pilots with experience of both types, if asked, would in fact take the P-47 as their preferred high altitude fighter aircraft because, especially in the M, it had such an enormous power and controllability advantage vs. Q-loading on the controls that it could fight the 40K/450mph+ fight in a way which few others could. Indeed, with a little bunt, the TBolt was the only platform that could catch the Me-262 on a rocket pass and thus ‘jug-or-naught’ it was by far, the best sustained energy fighter of the war. At the altitudes where it 8th Escort mattered.
When fighters were later tasked to do almost continual fighter sweep lolo attacks from mid 1944, losses across all types skyrocketed. But were particularly evident in the P-51 units because the specific features of it’s low frontal area and the inline liquid cooled engine which made it nominally ‘such a great A2A fighter’ in fact only served to render it more vulnerable to critical-hit cooling system damage which would deny even a limping-cripple RTB. Not so the Jug which was the airplane voted ‘most likely to bring you home’. The Jug also reliably carried more ordnance on more hardpoints.
Which prop is more like unto the F/A-22 vs. F-35 you ask? I think that’s obvious. Sustained Speed. Absolute Payload. Radius of action. Altitude performance. None belong to the JSF.
Using more modern analogies there are similar parallels.
The F-4 could outturn any MiG prior to the 21Bis because it’s controls were powered and it’s structural mass rigid. Above 350 knots. Does anybody remember this when asked how well the Phantom did against the ‘more agile’ MiG’s at 500 knot and 14-19K average ingress speeds? Nope.
The F-16 has LERX which extend forward under the cockpit to improve sustained turn in the ‘9G maneuver’ regime. Yet those same LERX, and the vortice flows they set up, ensure that the F-16 will /never/ accelerate through the Mach as well as it ‘turns through it’ (literally, the airframe has it’s best drag performance while in a loaded turn state). In ca. 1989 as the details of the Archer and HOBS capability in general were ‘all the rage’, Eidetics International was sponsored to find a way to remove the F-16’s useful AOA limitations. It again was discovered that the ‘bad idea’ was in fact the LERX. Because, while they allowed the airframe to sustain vortice lift in the 9G arena at a specific angle of attack regime (25-27`). They also contributed to the blanking effect and root separation as the nose came higher. Their solution? Simple. Cut back and rescallop the profile to something like that seen on the F-2. Where the LERX terminate /underneath/ the aft transparency. Sustained G is not as good but the ability to ‘pop a wheelie’ (and point an SRM into the wind) is vastly better while the provision of Raw IPE/EFE POWER (remember that first lesson we were talking about?) and 3D TVC (AVEN and PTBN technologies) meant that sustained G could be recovered, literally, through the nozzle.
The F-15 is similar to the F-16 in the design of it’s conically cambered wing LE. As it pays a HUGE penalty in drag as the airframe sprints up through the Mach while having one of if not in fact THE MEANEST aero-acoustic environments, underwing, of any fighter. This is why wingtips get ripped off occasionally and the outboard pylons were never carried (or on the E, even wired for). And specifically, accounts for why the A2A machines took so long to in fact /become/ ‘multirole’ wherein their own external fuel vs. multirack ordnance concerns are the foremost problem while retaining any semblance of ‘self escorting, Rapid Deployment Force’ (1st TFW had CFT and bombracks by the early 80’s to ‘go to the Gulf’, in a hurry, while the F-16’s scrounged around for tanking) capability.
Meanwhile F/A-18’s. Acknowledged the world over as being drag pigs with inferior acceleration, roll rate and loaded turn figures right from the initial FSD birds onwards, routinely (when new) beat the F100 powered ‘Ego Jet’ from .76 to .9 Mach. Simply because their F404’s spooled faster than the pre-DEEC’d F-15 engines did. Would they do so today, when the F-15’s have the 220/220E and the first generation F404 has suffered one of the worst thrust droops of any modern fighter engine? I doubt it. Especially hauling those ‘always necessary’ wing tanks for naval ops.
Why is this important? Because it shows that there are a lot of technical factors that can complicate ‘multirole the other way’ (basic aeros capability before mission need) too. And some of the solution paths chosen don’t turn out to be as hot as much as ‘convenient’ over the longer haul.
Indeed, an F-4C/D with PW-1120 engines, tuned variable ramps, low drag MRM carriage, a hardwing and digital flight controls could probably beat an F-16 through the Mach. It would certainly get to a faster pol speed for weapon release /after/ going supersonic. It would almost certainly beat both teeners for effective use of a five pylon (all heavyweight munition rated) combination of tanks and ordnance.
Which of these ‘classic’ light vs. heavyweight fighters is more like unto the F/A-22 vs. F-35? I’m not sure it matters to be honest. Because while stuffing a small aircraft full of fuel and then leaving it short of power and munitions to compensate will certainly cripple it’s direct (in-combat) efficiencies; the reality is that it is the _transit cruise_ portion of the flight which is now important.
Because we are no longer flying 500nm radii. But rather 750-1,200nm. And even with tanking, that is asking more of a pilot to endurance-race withstand than he should have to, at .9 Mach cruise velocities. And with a 6-9,000lb practical total external payload, no single engine fighter is now capable of ‘matching the pace’ (or holding the G-reserve for evasion) that a dual engine aircraft with sustained supersonics performance at altitude can.
7. Korea.
The MiG’s had altitude dominance in an airframe that was closer to being a sweptwing sailplane than a fighter. This gave them both the ability to come out of their baselanes with relative impunity (high climbrate in a short, protected, ground track) and to make the transit to NK airspace without interference. It also allowed them to /climb back up/ to altitude and make a power-back RTB that ended in a minfuel optimized descent profile back in China. If the Fagot had one shortcoming, it was again, those weak wings and ‘light to the feel’ aerocontrols which Q-froze up so badly at high speed that the only way they could really engage the F-86’s motoring along almost 10K below them was in a series of Mach-controlled helical windup turns that were /nothing/ if not easy to aspec deflect+con spot. A poor weapons system (cockpit view, older gyro sights and poor cannon mix) also didn’t help.
By comparison, the Saber, before the 4-3 wing mod, was also short of lift and it’s 86A ‘half of each’ (elevators on a slab) tail controls were also shy of maneuver authority. It /never/ had a decent engine though the later F models were less underpowered than earlier A/E’s and thus it’s primary claim to ‘superior high speed performance’ only came as a function of a downhill run by which it pulled the unwary MiG’s into nothing less than slaloming Thatch Weave tactics. It’s own .50 caliber mix was just next to a sewing machine in terms of only being able to kill the Russian pilot, with laughter. And again, when you can’t even FIRE your weapons without the recoil throwing you back out of position, you know you are fighting well above the effective combat ceilinged envelope.
The F-86 was _not_ a P-51 for range (the F-80/94 both were better) and indeed the average time in the Alley was less than 15 minutes which is only enough for sporting joust confrontations not decisive attrition. When fighter pilots become duelists for the fun of it rather than deliberate OCA butchers intent on removing their opposites from the equation, QUICKLY, to enable the prosecution of the rest of the air campaign, something is Very Wrong.
And that something turned out to be the F-104. A jet designed to topout over the MiG with ‘Mt. McKinley to spare’ and so much energy that it could run a supersonic 10 mile circle around the 15/17’s 5nm one. A jet which beat the persistence problem with such an inordinate amount of power that it could (and did) take 20 minutes and 100nm to go up to 70K and Mach 2 and then went another 300-500nm downrange on the ‘last 3,500lbs + Reserve’. In under 15.
A jet which, as a ‘pure WVR’ rocketship, could meet and beat ANY fighter before the F-teens, with ease.
And also a weapons platform which was so _utterly useless_ in all other combat airframe categories (high maintenance, non forgiving handling qualities, ‘Mirage Like’ fieldlength and approach speed requirements, no payload) that it was worthless for any other mission.
Thus we took the WRONG lesson from the WRONG war and came up with a fighter that couldn’t be beat. But which was itself useless for anything like a real spectrum of combat roles.
8. F-4: Mass Means More Than Mission.
If you can get the baseline right (performance in a reasonable operating envelope) developmental model progression is more important than basics of initial mission definition. Indeed, the F-4 was originally NOT multirole. Before Vietnam, it was not even what I would call ‘Air Superiority’ intended. As it didn’t even have AIM-9 capability but was simply ‘three tanks and 4 Sparrows’ worth of FADF missileer extension to meet the Russian AVMF Atomic Bombers.
That said, with a lot of evolutionary improvement, the F-4 /did become/ so capable.
Because it had the power and the gas and the NEED to do so. In this, ‘air to air’ was still a very necessary mission. Because people were not afraid to lose while winning. By sheer attrition of bodies. But it was in the addition of very draggy, Mach and cooled-seeker limited ‘dogfight’ pylons and eventually multimission ordnance that made the jet great. Even as the took a platform with really good high altitude fighter capabilities, right up to 40Kft. And made of it instead a _weapons platform_ whic could not fight above 25-27K and was utterly outmatched by almost any MiG (fast or slow) above 19K.
Yet even so, the real ‘multirole’ efficiency of the airframe was in it’s _production numbers_. Being both a live MACDAC program for which more replacements were always possible (compare, Crusader, F-100, F-105 etc.) and able to _lower costs_ through combined orders. Not merely service to service but mission to mission. In this, AAW is actually a sneaky ******* in that it can soak upwards of 70% ‘flown sorties’ of your available in-theater force assets as an insurance policy which is only fought perhaps 10% and get’s kills 2-5%.
Yet, if you have all-of-one type, then you can (usually) pinch hit for the mission at hand by sharing (airspeeds and tanking requirements etc.) ‘compatible’ mission taskings right across service as well and squadron lines.
So what is the ‘real lesson’ of the Phantom?
Nothing less than Vietnam.
Which is to say a washout because, if you don’t fight to win, you will lose. And the numbers of airframes you lose while losing will seem to massively inflate the requirements for inventory even as they devalue the systems engineering (radar weapons system + smart bomb carriage as definition of ‘multirole’) that is the cost of owning them. In this, we actually would have been better off going in NAKED, accepting losses without counter, as a function of simply bombing out of existence every SA-2 site and Airfield on a sheer basis of sortie numbers.
Let me state again: literally, we would have lost fewer planes if we had done NOTHING but bomb. Every IADS target that even a lagged tac-recce or national assets could spot and assign. Because Vietnam WAS a ‘back into the stone age’ nation, already. And that meant they had to import every piece of kit they fought with. Which in turn implies that, once you have killed their air defense by sheer weight of sortie density numbers, the only way they can regenerate is thru restricted theater-entry logistics chokes at border rail and harbor shipping. Which are themselves undefendable.
Thus you again have to be _very careful_ not just in what you assume be truths about visual vs. beyond visual air combat and ‘air vs. bombing’ emphasis on the multirole debate of weighted airframe emphasis.
But specifically, never take out of context the POLITICAL lessons-learned (or not) about a LOST WAR as having /any/ true meaning to the NEXT victorious one.
In terms of the 1970’s/80’s in particular, a much drawn down (tired and tail-number-to-tail-number unique, stressed skin, high maintenance airframe) force of Guard/Rez F-4 units were _still_ the most important of our LGB and Maverick capable smart shooters. And would have had to prove this in any major campaign in the Middle East or Europe where the baseline USAFE + CENTCOM forces were rapidly worn down if not preemptively obliterated. And couldn’t smart bomb anyway.
Never doubt that an F-4D with three tanks, an ECM pod, a Spike pod, 2 Sparrow and 2 Shrike, 4 Mavericks or 2 LGB is ‘superior’ to both the F-15 and the F-16 as an ‘altogether now’ mission force capable of ‘swingrole’ handling more threats, at great enough if not greater (UK and Spain to Germany) radius than the teeners could manage to be, with similar ordnance.
The Eagle paid dearly for giving up those outboard pylons. The F-16 simply never was that hot to begin with and given the lag in AMRAAM and LANTIRN was a mistake that only a reemphasis upon ‘the veiled fist’ of nuclear cruise and theater ballistics could cover for in keeping the Bear out of the Toll Booth that was a WWIII in Europe.
9. F-5->F-20. The Fairy Tale and The Reality.
The F-5A was a toy. Originally designed when Northrop were looking to expand past their NF-102 Fang misadventures by capitalizing on the T-38 techbase, it was /tested/ for an ARMY CAS (against the G-91, A-4 and Gnat IIRR) role that would soon die in Key West. Being ‘fostered’ by the USAF as part of the deal, it went to Vietnam ‘anyway’ (we were that badly off for want of an F-100/A-37/O-1/OV-1/OV-10 COIN CAS replacement). Where the Skoshi Tiger program brought a lot of systems weight increases (armor and all weather nav avionics among others) plus a ‘real warload’ that could ONLY be compared, favorably, to the Super Saber.
With a system of ‘catapulting’ (15-20K burner-forward loft, glide down, 1-3 pass reattack and maximum efficiency slow-cruise profile back to height for RTB) it did okay as a ca. 1970 alternative to props and absent Navy CAS air (A-4/A-6 were both much better for both accuracy, payload and loiter). But it could not stand tall to later arrival of NVA made all of the DMZ and much of the Northern RVN a radar defensive zone, even before the overrun.
In A2A ops, the Little Tiger flew like a Little Pig with the triple tank (and no IFR probe) configuration it had to employ to win back the AIM-9 rails. It /never/ could have kept up with the average 500 knot ingress profiles of the major strike packages operating in the RP5/6 areas. And it’s unlikely that it could have stretched that far without problematic (P&D remember) gas pass effects on the tanker force anyway.
NONE of the ‘seriously combattant’ nations (ME/PG, almost to man) kept the series-1 F-5 when the F-4/5E and later MiG/Mirage variants became available. Because it simply could do nothing, far enough, heavy enough or with enough (radar ranging) sophistication to be a winner. Only in NATO Europe where the ‘hi’ end alternative was the suicide sled F-104, did the original model stick around. Nominally because they had never tried to make it fight and it was admittedly cheap to /fly/. In a ‘guess what my other sports car is?’ pilot’s club fashion.
The F-5E was an attempt to make good everything wrong with the F-5A by incorporating most of the NF-5 technologies along with the J85-GE-21 engines in a fuel-scaled airframe able to make use of the added thrust. While it works as a ground attack aircraft (180-220nm radius, if you’re careful), it lost everything as an A2A machine when they didn’t incorporate even a modicum of RSS design methodology to buy back the nose radar and longer, wider, wing chords with some increased throw on the CG static margins. Basically, the F-5E is a more reliable F-5A with better (believable anyway) supersonics intercept persistence and the same startling rate of roll but NO nose-hose agility. Something which was routinely proven when the ‘cement truck now has special drag inducing devices’ slatted F-4E could still routinely out turn if not out scissors the new Aggressor.
F-5G. Too much too soon. F-20. Too little too late.
I first started seeing milrag ads for the F-5G as a topdown planview of ‘A/E/G’ depicted evolution back in 1979 or so. The basis of the ‘proud heritage, one step further!’ justification bothered me even then because it seemed to emphasize reliability of past performance over improvements in new. A fact taken further with the ‘three configuration’ step upgrades that were initially promised. One as little more than an F-5A with gunranging radar and basic A2A ordnance on three pylons. The other as an enhanced F-5E with cockpit and canopy upgrades as well as rated pylons for A2G missions an alternative radar (ground mapping/air to surface ranging) and some basic (INS, TACAN etc.) nav gear. The last being the ‘full up, as good as the AF but we won’t say the F(alcon) word’ with a multifunction radar, EW kit, jettisonable 5-pylon (wet) carriage system and improved aeros handling inherent to active FBW.
As a function of being able to perform the full spectrum of missions inherent to external tanks and fully rated pylons. It seemed to me then and certainly now, that in a world where the politics of Carter were fading in the light of activities ongoing in the ME and AfG and a new President promising a ‘Strong America Again!’ that this was not what the ‘latest and greatest’ advertising market share wanted to see.
Particularly since the last (full capability) standard was the one least developed.
By the time Northrop realized this, it was too late as a nomenclature change to recognize ‘how advanced the F-20 was’ came at the same time as Reagan shut the door on AIDC production and the AF began ‘not saying as much as selling’, what the advantages of the Tigershark might be compared to the F-16. In campaigns across SEA and Europe. Added problems inherent to refusal to allow the jet to where star and bar vice civil codes (the rollout F-5E was a civil airplane and had them) and the ‘Suddenly SAR’ (Special Access Required, pre-FMS clearance) for weapons suite discussions also were cruel.
It all came down to production scalar economics, seats in Congressional Committees and the USAF willingness to back the Lone Star Republic over Palmdale. Given that there was also a ‘Presidential Bias’ against past Administration programs, Tom Jones I think it was should have seen the light before the first prototype even flew yet as things stood, he didn’t start to lose control over his board or (the belief of) his stockholders until 1982 or ’83 when they were already hip deep into the flight test program.
Unfortunately, even here they failed to standup a reasonable weapons system testbed (take the first two demonstrators back to the factory instead heading off ‘to Paris’) and thus they came off sounding irresponsible as much as incompetent program managers.
And the F-20 itself was no great shakes. Like the F-16 it didn’t really have lot of things it needed, internally, (advanced RWR/SPJ, multiple expendables bricks, EO targeting head) and it’s wing area and shortage of pylons in comparison with the Falcon only made this problem worse as the jet _could not_ project power the way the Falcon could, even with a centerline MER. And it couldn’t /turn/ the way an F-16 could, though it’s instantaneous pointability was actually a little better (hard to hold this up as being superior when it didn’t come with a better than AIM-9J, 17` bore, heat weapon choice.).
It accelerated like skunk and it had all the goodies of a superb PDI (fast-light engine, good cold start avionics, competitive climbout profiles etc.). But I would be surprised if it liked the AIM-7 any better than the Viper did and that plus a little more user friendly radar modes (it had one of the first ‘SA Display’ radar/HSI interleaves and took a hit from McDonnell for copying the F/A-18 in this) was all that made it stand taller than the Falcon in the DCA role. Given the outcomes of AIMVAL/ACEVAL, Sparrow was just not justifiable on it’s own.
One thing the F-20 did surprisingly well was overwater endurance ASST and ASUW missions. Though it only had a single Harpoon, with twin tanks it could do a complex search coverage pattern at 530nm radii and in an airframe about 2/3rds the size of a Mirage F-1 that’s no mean thing. The APG-67 was also superior at SS1/2 type interleaved, ‘into trough’ sea search modes with good small-hull pickup. Thus, when the ADF competition was ongoing (and before all the crashes IIRR), the Saudi’s actually came to Northrop with an offer to license build ‘300 F-20’s in trade for export help on 500 Leo-IIs’ and Northrop took the wrong tack in thinking they were better off with a coproduction arrangement with either Bristol up in Canuckia or Samsung Aero over in ROK.
Anyway, when ADF fell through for nominally ‘budgetary’ reasons (honk if you live in Ft. Worth), with further conversion of F-16A’s overriding Northrop yells of unfair pricing and Congressional pressure to ‘show us love’ on an 11 million dollar F-16C; Northrop scrambled to come up with big wing and bigger engine models as a multirole rush to find new missions, while prototype #4 (the first F-20A with a fully functional weapons system) was still on the line. Taller inlets to feed vaporware 1120 or 414 engines allied to 480sq ft wings (duhhh IIRR) meant nothing when the internal funding finally dried up and the CEO left in disgrace as everything was quietly, quickly, packed up as thje final realization of a bad capital investment being thrown after good. With the ‘too hot for the pilot’ bad karma crash investigations also basically decapitating the program from the flight test side as well.
In this case, the _failure to define_ a mission set vice an airframe solution was what doomed the Tigershark. When set atop an obviously beautiful but aging (remember, the early 80’s were also the era of the ‘canards on everything!’ planform layouts and rumored stealth) airframe configuration that was clearly not ready for production at anything but a basic dayfighter level, _without a first customer_ (role makes country, country chooses role) the whole production schedule and contractual maintenance:cost levels that were originally used to justify on-the-cheap production were thrown out the window.
In this, I’m not so sure that Jimmy C and his degraded MAP fighter (F-16/79 etc.) export policiies were not at least partially to blame for what came down to nothing more or less than a current events sea change of Iranian Hostage Taking and AfG but the burden of conceptual justification /beyond/ politics (external manufacturing connections to transfer the techbase to etc.) still belong to the parent company. And Northrop just refused to see where the USAF was headed with the F-16-as-all preferred alternative.
10. Systems Management is NOT the definition of Technology Sophistication.
The latter being ruled by the /ease/ of platform-mission execution. Which is, in turn, a function of encounter mode. Though we have had some successes and many failures in pioneering Pilot’s Associate levels of aided system mode execution, the real difficulty is always inherent to the layering of engineering and particularly production technologies to enable the simplicity of point and click (selectivity of targeting through deliberate ignoring of non-relevant threats) ‘before the pilot interface’ rather than thru it.
In this, the primary enablers (and detractors) have always been ‘offboard’ and only the combination of materials, propulsion and signature technologies needed to ‘bring them closer or roll them back’ through VLO, Supercruise and an C4ISR inputs to a basic ARH+LPI defined weapons system have made the leap seem revolutionary rather than evolutionary.
People who are confused right now should think about how well they KNOW the F/A-22 Raptor. Is it a bomber? Is it a fighter? Or is it a _penetrating intruder_ whose ‘mission’ is on-the-fly defined by nature of the available targets vice threats? If ignorance leads you to role-cast the airframe as a singular spec’d platform then you are trying to cubbyhole the /concept/ of force multiplication by deep penetrating airpower into the ‘way it gets there’ by shooting down airplanes or dropping bombs.
OTOH, if you understand that the F/A-22’s mission in life is to give it’s pilots ordnance expenditure CHOICES (who dies, where, and when) from among the whole spectrum of targets available then you begin to understand that multimission is a function of exploitation of circumstance.
And that understanding the circumstance is KEY to knowing what actions you wish to instigate to modify it’s outcome.
When the ATF program came online, the mission set was HVA and formation destroyer roles far East over Poland and even Western/Baltic TVD Russia. It wasn’t necessary to know how much stuff was on the ground, only which _specific_ systems (and it came down to a handful of sites as much as SA-xx numbers) that had to be neutralized to a given detection radii so that a supersonic cruise aircraft could penetrate to within killing distance of those targets.
What finally gelled together when all the numbers matched has now given us a ‘generic’ airframe which lacks some specialized sensors but can, as a delivery platform penetrate so DEEP (or far ahead if you prefer) into an enemies decision loop that you can strike Tipping Points of ‘aggressive negotiation’ conflict deescalation without concern for initial force masses. Because it is ‘that good’ in terms of signature and speed for range.
Unfortunately, where that targeting must be (and indeed is best-when) developed from assets whose penetration is not nearly as important as their endurance and ability to sort massive inputs of these ‘overwhelmingly complex’ ISR product streams, people tend to lose track and make false assumptions along the lines of:
“It’s not capable of targeting on it’s own, therefore it must not be able to bomb accurately and if it cannot bomb on it’s own then the platforms which can bomb ‘and’ fight air to air must be multi/swingrole superior.”
This ignores major problems.
a. No fighter can truly ‘target’ on it’s own. It lacks the time overhead and the sensor FOV/analysis capability to make critical valueing decisions on aimpoints and frag ordering that is more naturally a function of the ‘surveillance’ portion of ISR. It may acquire and confirm weapons system overlay of a given set of aimpoints. But it DOES NOT really ‘look for’ even these. So much as acquire what has already been cued-onto prediscovered.
b. No fighter which in fact is NOT THERE is any good as a bomber, either. Whether this be due to threats pushing it away or to radius and time to reach it, the fact remains that the most valuable of target sets are fleeting in their visibility and the most dangerous of enemies will not threaten you over /their skies/ (the Hitler and Jagdwaffe solution) but over your bases (the political and theater missile one). The first being driven by time on station. The second being a factor of radius from threat effecting ballistic accuracies and payload.
c. The prerequisite to achieve ‘hi marks’ in both ground attack and air to air warfare should NEVER be based on the theory that ‘when jumped’ (forced to fight) your name-this-performance-spec brochure numerics are better than the threat’s. Rather, the decisional point of excellence should be the _number of times_ you are able to detect and evaluate a threat at a distance for which killing him, running away or simply going around, does THE WAR EFFORT the most good. Here too, a lot more can be gained by having the systems which make the initial detection be located on platforms which don’t care about giving away their presence by searching for the threat. But the F/A-22 in particular also needs a good, rapid-range-isolating acquisition and sort (supercruise = twice the overground rate or as much as 3.5 times the front quarter closure) direct capability.
If you evaluate the F/A-22 by the reasoning above then it becomes clear that the only way to make it work is by including ALL the platforms that support it (RQ-1/4, U-2R, E-3/8 etc.) and placing THEIR value against the mass of conventional fighters which would otherwise still have to exist in incredible support-mission overlap numbers to fill the same ‘on sight=on site’ roles.
Once you compare the cost of Super Wing of 12 F-16CJ, 12 F-16CG, 8 F-15C, 4 B-1B and 10 KC-135 to the cost of a squadron of Raptors and a ‘deployment pack’ of X-counted UAV drones plus 2-3 KC-135 to give the smaller basing footprint and tanking/sensorization _only_ enablement. The F/A-22 comes out ontop as being the simplest and FASTEST way to generate multiple bombs on target repetitions which other assets find.
Again, particularly once the radii go up above 1,000nm, the Raptor will _beat everyone_ on targets serviced vs. millions of dollars in hardware value and yearly training costs required to support it. And thus ‘lightweight fighter mafia’ supporters must be criticized on the TON:HOUR:HOUR /per mile/ of fuel and support mission sortie allocation over time frame X necessary to support their microjet strategies.
Rather than total hours (missions) flown in an airwar where saturation of precision munitions on targets in a narrow window is what STOPS the conflict and allows political negotiation to have an effect.
11. Encounter Modes Rule ALL.
Where the Asset Value of a platform (given as a scalar ‘above or below’ rating relative to an existing mean) is often the inverse of the Mission Value (number of roles in which the airframe has a particular high rating for success) vs. the Threat Values by which independent (per type) enemy systems are ranked on a scalar listing of conditional defeat.
EM’s dictate the nature of the environmental/situational modified scenario by which the value of the asset is either protected or risked as a function of mission achievement vs. survival. Usually as a function of time (between threat-X/Y/Z encounters indicating saturation), aspect (relative positioning as a function of first detection and delay til weapon or maneuver or simple extensioned response) and range (density of overlap between threats as much as distance from platform at which said threat response is first initiated).
An F-22 with an Asset Value of 2 on a scale of 1-20 with 10 being the median value of an F-16C.50+, costs the same to replace as FIVE Vipers. But it is also CAPABLE of doing so. Why? Because it doesn’t need a SEAD escort. And it drops it’s own Smart Bombs. And it seldom is engaged ‘as an equal’ by threat air, requiring fewer shots to win a contested engagement.
It’s Mission Value will be relative to ordnance loadout but might be stated as: 2X.95 BVR Planned. 2X.80 BVR unplanned. 2X.75 WVR planned. 2X.55 WVR unplanned. 4X.80 S2A Planned. 4X.45 S2A Popop. X1 .80 A2G Planned. Indicating the number of Beyond Visual, Within Visual, Destruction of enemy AD and Interdiction/Strike options inherent to a loadout of say X4 GBU-39, X1 GBU-32, X2 AIM-120C and X2 AIM-9X.
Threat Values, also relative to a scalar of a mean platform type (preserving sensitive data) might be 3 for a MiG-21. 7 for a Su-30 and 5 for an S-300V battery.
By working some (simulator) math you can ‘adjust’ the independent signature/detection threshold and range/envelope modeling for all types of systems to ensure that the Asset Value is never ‘by the numbers’ exceeded by individual threat values as a function of achieving mission objectives at EM factored distances and threat overlaps sufficient to _avoid_ as much as engage, victoriously, the target defensive matrix.
Put simply, in WWII, we thought of losses in terms of airframes per raid, with 10% being unsustainable and 3-5% being acceptable. In the Cold War, we thought in terms of airframes per nautical mile of terrain capture or asset destruction and the threshold of nuclear release. Today, we think of mission achievement in terms of pilots lost, political pride and airframe replacement costs. As well as ease of deployment to far off places and rapidity of onset in achieving specific theater goals with minimal support or notification.
EM’s let you think about the WAYS in which to achieve this, with a mix and match of tactics and weapons to platform-X.
Since no airframe has the established production numbers and qualified missions (ordnance and avionics) of the F-16 and no airframe with a pilot is going to be less valuable than a robot, it is likely that the pursuit of a ‘lightweight replacement’ platform is doomed by the very nature of decreasing dollar values (purchasing power) per generation and increasing technical leverage required to maintain even a basic ‘equivalency’ of mission capability. The F-35A is now slated to cost 48 million dollars, almost twice that of an F-16C. Yet it can’t perform DEAD or A2A ‘equivalent’ (shots fired) to the Viper without moving to external carriage which reduces it’s survival level against the rated Threats. Thus you have something which does ‘half as many missions with half as much ordnance’ yet costs twice as much. This puts it’s AV at say 4.5 and it’s MV at X2 WVR Planned @ .95; X2 WVR unplanned @ .75; X2 Strike Planned @ .90; and X2 Strike Unplanned @ .85. A MiG-21 might be scaled relative to the F-35 as a 5 because, absent supercruise and a 50K operating ceiling, the MiG-21 can actually catch it and because JSF only has 2 AAM shots to make the decisive kill before entering the WVR arena (where it becomes guns against missiles and things get VERY ugly, very fast). A Su-30 might actually be a 10. Because the NOO-12 is very powerful and has excellent volume refresh and the Flanker has the gas to both carry a lot of shots and chase from a very large number of aspect offsets.
Thus both in the numbers required to replace it’s predecessor, literally 1:1. And in the level of mission capability vs. threat that those numbers represent, the JSF requires more sorties (and more exposure) as well as more gas and more training to both deploy to theater and to stage useful missions in it. The EM’s of which are narrowed by the performance factors and weapon load onboard.
IMO, as long as you have a man aboard, you will NEVER clear the AV=10 threshold of the F-16. Which in turn means that dropping numbers of MV achieved per platform ‘for cost’, doesn”t do a helluva lot of good. OTOH, if you remove the man, so that you can /deliberately/ (Hyeeear Kitty, Kitty!) ‘randomize’ the encounter modes, then you are actually paid BACK to also tighten up mission capabilities into just a very few roles (1 or 2). Because the number of shots you can carry in those missions is improved and so to is the likely sensor-applicability for targeting in them.
Thus the ‘lightweight fighter’ market is in fact a _UCAV_ dominated one with AV’s on the order of 11-15. With a Cruise Missile secondary that occupies the last 5 zones. Becuase while they may need 1-2 even 3-4 to equal the F-16 as a ‘total systems’ self escorting penetrator, they can be purchased in roughly similar numbers. And by existing in those numbers, can afford to trade, 1:1, with enemy S2A defenses in particular as a function of deliberate baiting. While their endurance (lowered drag, lowered thrust) implies that they STILL don’t use as much fuel in deployment.
The ideal mix then being a few jets which have the s;ecifialist sensors and performance to accomplish missions (AAW) which will always require a big gas tank, a big weapons bay and a big nose. While a much larger force of much smaller platforms which can afford to be lost in tempting the enemy to come git sum. Particularly where the latter required ZERO yearly training and are ‘ace out of box’.

CONCLUSION:
Don’t let yourself be suckered into determining capability of a given airframe by the nature of the letter prefix before or ‘age group after’ that is series number. Because it’s less about the specific capability of an airframe than the /generation/ of doctrine around which it was designed that counts. Gen-3 F-Teens exist in a hi-lo tiered ‘weighting’ of systems designed to force the encounter mode through a filtered series of (by asset value) support missions. If the enemy does not fight back or if you cannot haul enough gas for disparate mission platforms far enough forward to support the ‘total package’, you are screwed. Gen-4 (excepting the Raptor) seeks to composite all Gen-3 missions into a single, munitions-superior, swingrole platform. Given that the ordnance is largely backdateable to Gen-3, there is really little difference between the two. Gen-5 is a hollow definition filled at present solely by JSF which is Gen-4 with stealth and more gas as an alternative to more munitions but still not solving the basics of TIME, on station to gather targets or in transit lag to the target area. Facets which are now coming to haunt tacair abilities to project power decisively. Gen-6 is undefined but will most likely be pure-UCAV. A platform so specialized AND ‘lightweight’ in it’s role functioning as to trade multi-anything for simple replacement/training costs and the ability to find targets in the interval of normal raid planning.

Nor should you be conned into thinking that numbers purchased necessarily determines roles most accomplished. Because roles that are secondary to the primary mission objectives are effectively sorties that could have otherwise (if the ‘escorted’ platform were more controlled-EM capable or less-costly riskable) been allocated to other targets (and larger theater warplan goals) as well. If you can find the critical targets that you need to. Drop on the targets that may be separated by hours without fatigue. Or attack those shielded by multiple levels of defensive layering without forced encounter moding through each. You have the ability to shorten the /total/ ‘active combat’ period to a degree never before known weeks to days to hours.

You REALLY don’t want to get into the mindset that ‘just because you survived’ a forced encounter mode with a threat NOT part of your mission index that someone, somewhere, hasn’t screwed up by exposing you at all. The best victory is inherent to the fight you never have to entangle yourself in. The best kill is a bomb which destroys your enemy on the ground in the period when he doesn’t think there is any air activity and thus doesn’t defend himself against.

Lastly, in a world where munitions home onto mathematical coordinate memories rather than physical signatures, don’t be fooled into believing that he who spots the target is somehow less involved or important than he who points the telescopic sight and pulls the trigger. Any monkey or silicon chip can press a pickle button. Only a very few platforms can currently summon the endurance and wide-capture apertures to /find/ a target worth dropping on. None of the best of the latter are manned. Such is the difference between Airborne _Surveillance_ and Targeting (AST). And since you can’t kill what you can’t find, THESE are the platforms that need to have the most eyes-on-enemy funding investment to develop a fleet infrastructure. Because we can now drop vastly more bombs, per airframe, than we can find eligible targets needing killing.

KP

Fighter mafia? respected? your kidding right??? They fought tooth and nail for damn near everything, they have always been viewed as nut cases and then the aircraft have vindicated them… They did not want to kill the Eagle outright either, they are the ones who made the Eagle what it is today!!!!

I think Pierre Sprey and the Boyd Boys know a bit more about this type of stuff then anyone on this board :rolleyes:

PS That Sprey briefing is pure Boyd! Wonderful, I loved it…

Let me read the files and get back to you about what i think, but just scanning through the Sprey briefing, it is what John Boyd was hammering throughout the 1980’s and 90’s. Almost verbatim actually, I will post some of the Boyd Briefings about this when I have some time to find them.

well, the files are from CDI, a Washington think tank that is comprised mostly of military men.

some points they mentioned:

-Israel valued their Mirage IIIs more than their F-4’s in air to air combat
-Pakistani F-86’s achieved more kills than their larger Indian counterparts
-Me 262s were superior, but overcome by larger number of inferior P-51s, etc
-quantity is emphasized

some suggestions they make or imply:

-the next fighter should be around 11 million
-the next fighter should be physically small
-the next fighter should have a bubble canopy and good rear view
-The F-5 and earlier F-16s were the closest to their ideal design, and in some ways, so was the F-104
-the next fighter should be bought in quantity and overwhelm the opponents
-the next generation aerial warfare will see aircraft turning their radars off

some questions I had in mind when reading it:
-more smaller fighters require building more forward bases to deploy them
-some areas where the US might get involved, require distance to reach the target
-technology has improved to the point where BVR and RWR has improved significantly
-aircrafts that match the description of what is preferred are the Golden Eagle, FC-1, and LCA. but i doubt any of them can reach that 11 million price tag, not even the FC-1.
-the rest of the world doesn’t really have aircraft in quantity the way the US does..except for China. In some of the last several conflicts, the US and allies had both a quality and quantity advantage.
-future UCAVs could be built to match that spec and price tag.